Inside the New Yorker

If you haven't yet picked up the New Yorker's double fiction issue (June 9 & 16) be sure to do so this week while it's still on newsstands. For bookish types, it offers several distinct pleasures.

One is the wry but very relevant cover, which shows a young woman accepting an amazon.com delivery package even as she watches the man next door opening up a small book shop (and he is watching her too although we can't see the look on his face – maybe just as well....)

Another is the publication of a new (well, okay, newly published) story by Nabokov.

But there are other gems as well, one of my favorites being the piece by Haruki Murakami called "The Running Novelist." The creative process – and the various shapes and forms it takes in the lives of different artists – is always a fascinating thing to study. And then there's Louis Menand's review of a new Ezra Pound bio.

I don't know about you but I do some of my best reading in bagel or coffee shops. And at least for those of us on the East Coast this week, a smoothie, a corner in an air-conditioned cafe, and the New Yorker seems to me an almost perfect antidote to whatever is happening outside.